{"id":1671,"date":"2016-10-22T08:01:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-22T12:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silvercentury.org\/2017\/09\/new-names-for-todays-households\/"},"modified":"2018-03-31T09:02:07","modified_gmt":"2018-03-31T13:02:07","slug":"new-names-for-todays-households","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/2016\/10\/new-names-for-todays-households\/","title":{"rendered":"New Names for Today’s Households"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I wrote in a previous blog about older kids returning to live with their parents<\/a>, it really wasn’t that long ago that it was OK, respectable even, for a young adult to live at home until marriage. Then it became almost unheard of in my generation. And now, everything old being new again, 85 percent of college grads return home before flying solo, according to Time<\/em> magazine. Sociologist Katherine Newman, author of The Accordion Family: Boomerang Kids, <\/em>Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition<\/em> (2012), says it’s a global issue.<\/p>\n

First, the trend was called \u201cboomerang kids.\u201d Next, returning kids were called an \u201caccordion family.\u201d In a PBS interview, Newman said, \u201cThe reason I use the accordion term is to capture this sense of expansion and contraction, that the family is not a stable group. It’s sort of moving in and out. But primarily, I mean multigenerational households with working or nonworking young adults and their parents.\u201d<\/p>\n